Various types of software products for editing digital images exist in the marketplace. Although many of these products perform basic editing tasks such as cutting, cropping, and touching-up reasonably well, it can be difficult to segment images using these products. Segmentation involves isolating a desired portion of an image and separating that portion from the rest of the image.
Conventionally, some photo-editors provide segmentation tools based on user-based seeds that must be placed on desired segmentation boundaries. However, this is often a tedious task since the seeds must be very carefully placed. For instance, it is usually necessary to place numerous seeds directly on the boundary. Although some conventional photo-editors do provide for more relaxed seed placement, these segmentation tools tend to produce inaccurate results.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to provide improved segmentation techniques for photo-editing that overcome the problems of conventional approaches.